"Is Monk Fruit Sweetener Safe?"
A number of artificial sweeteners have
been FDA-approved in North America,
including aspartame and sucralose
(sold as Splenda).
But, there are also
natural high-intensity sweeteners
found in plants.
The global market for non-nutritive
sweeteners in general, these non-caloric
sweeteners, is in the billions,
including all the artificial ones—
and two natural ones extracted from plants:
stevia and monk fruit.
I’ve done a video about stevia;
what about monk fruit?
The fruits of Luo Han Guo—monk fruit in Chinese—
have evidently been used for hundreds
of years as a natural sweetener and folk medicine.
The non-caloric sweet taste comes from mogrosides,
a group of cucurbitane-type triterpene glycosides that
make up about 1% of the fruit,
and are like hundreds of times
sweeter than sugar.
The mixed mogrosides have been estimated
to be about 300 times as sweet
as table sugar, such that an 80% extract
was nearly 250 times sweeter than sugar.
If you read reviews in Chinese natural medicine journals,
you’ll see pronouncements like this:
monk fruit has been shown to have
anti-coughing effects, anti-asthma,
anti-oxidation, liver-protection,
blood sugar-lowering, immuno-regulation,
and anti-cancer.
But, what they don’t tell you up front
is that they’re talking about reducing
ammonia-induced mouse coughs.
A natural food sweetener with
anti-pancreatic cancer properties?
Monk fruit “may be used for daily
consumption as an additive in foods
and drinks to prevent or treat pancreatic cancer.”
Yeah, maybe in your pet mouse.
And, the anti-proliferative activity
of monk fruit in colorectal cancer
and throat cancer was on colorectal
and throat cancer cells in a petri dish.
Now, they did show mogrosides killing
off colorectal cancer cells and throat cancer cells,
and our digestive tract could be
directly exposed to these compounds
if we ate them, but what’s missing?
Right, they didn’t test it against normal cells.
You could pee in a petri dish
and kill off cancer cells.
The whole point is to find something
that kills off cancer but
leaves normal cells alone,
something that they weren’t
able to show here.
Are there any human studies on monk fruit?
No, …
until now.
Owing to the rapidly growing popularity
of natural plant-based sweeteners,
they thought it would be of interest
to determine whether natural sweeteners
would be a healthier alternative
to sugar or artificial sweeteners.
So, they randomized people to drink
an aspartame sweetened beverage
versus monk fruit sweetened,
versus stevia
versus table sugar.
And then they measured blood sugars
over 24 hours, and there was
no significant difference found
between any of them.
But, wait a second.
The sugar group was given 16 spoonfuls of sugar,
the amount of added sugar in a
20-ounce bottle of Coke.
So, the other three groups consumed
16 less spoonfuls of sugar
and still had the same average blood sugars?
But, table sugar causes a big
blood sugar spike.
Here it is; I’ll show you.
Drink that bottle of sugar water
with its 20 sugar cubes worth of sugar,
and your blood sugars jump 40 points
over the next hour.
Whereas, you give them an aspartame
sweetened beverage, or monk fruit,
or stevia, and nothing happens,
which is what you’d expect, right?
These are non-caloric sweeteners,
no calories.
It’s just like you’re drinking water,
right?
So, how could your daily blood sugar
values average out the same?
The only way that could happen is if
the non-calorie sweeteners maybe made
your blood sugar spikes worse
somehow later in the day?
Look what happens when you give people
Splenda mixed with sugar water.
You get a greater blood sugar spike,
a greater insulin spike chugging the
sugar with sucralose than without,
even though Splenda alone causes
no spike of its own.
So, does aspartame do the same thing?
At the one-hour mark,
they fed people a regular lunch.
And, so, the blood sugars went back up
and down as they normally
would after a meal.
Not spiking as high as
drinking straight sugar water,
just a gentle up and down.
OK, but that was in the group that
drank the sugar an hour before.
In the group that drank the aspartame,
even though their blood sugars didn’t rise
at the time, an hour later at lunch,
they shot up higher, as if the person
had just drank a bottle of soda.
OK, but what about the natural sweeteners,
stevia and monk fruit?
Same thing.
Same exaggerated blood sugar spike
to a regular meal taken an hour later.
So, you can see how it all equals out
in terms of average blood sugars
even though in these three
non-caloric sweetener groups,
they took in 16 spoonfuls less sugar,
at least in part because they ate more.
After drinking a Diet Coke, you’re more likely
to eat more at your next meal than
drinking a regular Coke.
In fact, so much more that the energy 'saved'
from replacing sugar with non-caloric
sweeteners was fully compensated for
at a subsequent meal;
hence, no difference in total daily
calorie intake was found.
The sugar-sweetened beverage led to
large spikes in both blood sugar and insulin,
whereas these responses were higher
for the three other beverages
following the lunch later.
So, when it came to calorie intake,
or blood sugars, or insulin spikes,
they were all just as bad.